The beginning of the war on terror at the turn of the century coincided with the creation of new euphemisms to describe things that were already well defined. Although military idioms have long tortured language for the sake of specious arguments, there was a new audacity in the way it was being reshaped to excuse the previously inexcusable.Torture, for example, became ‘enhanced interrogation’ and it didn’t take long for images to leak from Abu Ghraib in Iraq showing the sadism that condoning it had unleashed on those held there, 70-90 percent of whom were innocent. Even the supreme international crime,